Reinventing the Web

We’ve seen some successful technical “reinventions” of the Web such as HTTPS/2 and HTML5 making sites faster and more responsive, but this “Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It” initiative is not new, but I will come to that later.

There are a number of issues that have concerned many people, not just in the IT Security industry, but many regular internet users.

Snowden’s leaks, whatever you may think of the rights and wrongs of him making these disclosures, the lengths government agencies go to snoop are a concern to anyone that understands them.

Facebook have been accused of meddling in US elections and Google has been caught out manipulating Brexit searches. There are many other cases, promises that they are not, it’s too complex to understand etc.. But really do you belive them, maybe you don’t care.

Google does have many alternatives, a couple are duckduckgo.com which addresses the bias and startpage.com which address the privacy issues, but neither have picked up many users, maybe if the close to half of English users who support leaving the EU were aware there was an alternative un-biased search engine they would use it. I tend to use Google a lot, as I use a lot of tools that they only have (Dorks etc.), But I am sure that is not the case of the loyalty shown by the majority of users, I think just familiarity and lack of knowledge of an alternative.

Facebook, now that’s an interesting one, they really have a monopoly in the Western world, there were a few competitors in the early days, but they are all gone now. Facebook has become a huge part of peoples lives, I default to skype if needing to contact friends or family, but there are some who will only respond to Facebook messenger contact.

There have been a number of open source alternatives, and to reinvent the Web as Tim Berners-Lee suggests an open source alternative to Facebook is what would be needed. The most upto date and vibrant alternative is the diaspora project, much of the initial funding came from Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder). It works, I have set up a few diaspora servers myself, but it is impossible now to unhook a large enough proportion of the population from Facebook, and get their involvement in anything else now, it is the nature of social networking.

Put it another way, not one of the top ten celebrities on facebook have a diaspora* account. I bet none in the top 100, but it would take me too long to confirm that.

I suspect that this very well meaning group of the technically able can create alternatives, but they do not have the ability to get people to switch over?